Judy Pfaff

In a career spanning five decades, Pfaff shifted the scope of contemporary practice and influenced multiple generations of artists. She spatialized drawing into a sculptural realm contingent upon, but independent of, architecture. Her wild, densely articulated installations defy conventions, and her paintings, prints, drawings, and sculptures carry the simultaneous strategy and abandon. While her work is not usually overtly political, she rose to prominence at a time when there were still rather few women in art, and consequently, her unapologetically brazen approach helped define a feminist path in contemporary art. Her work has been shown in over 100 major solo exhibitions, most notably at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Library of Congress. She represented the United States at the 1998 S�o Paulo Biennial and the 1982 Venice Biennale. Pfaff's long list of honors includes a MacArthur Foundation award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.